The 'Who' of Teaching

Who we are matters to our teaching every bit as much as what we
teach and how we choose to teach it.

Those of us who teach have little difficulty in identifying the "what"
and "how" of teaching. We recognize them by their conventional
names--"content" and "method." And the debate about their relative
importance in the preparation and everyday practice of teachers
continues to command attention today, just as it has preoccupied
educators for almost three millennia.

To be sure, most of us agree on the importance of both content and
method to teachers' effectiveness; teaching, we correctly say, is
inconceivable without both. But we differ, and probably always will, on
the desirable balance between the two. Those who prepare teachers are
likely to favor one at the expense of the other; and those, like us,
who have taught, seem to obey an internal sense of the just proportion
of each while improvising in the classroom and trying to maintain our
knowledge and effectiveness through "in-service" and other programs.
Meanwhile, that third component of teaching--the "who" of
teaching--goes largely neglected, as it always has.

Yet the truth is that who we are matters to our teaching every bit
as much as what we teach and how we choose to teach it. In fact, our
characters and personalities determine the quality and effectiveness of
our teaching long before what we know and how we present it even come
into play. Questions about their teachers, especially about their
personal qualities, crowd into our students' minds before they're
conscious of the fact: Who is this person? Do I like (or dislike) her?
What do I like (or dislike) about him? How can I find out more about
her? It is the qualities of our selves and characters that are
immediately on display when we try to instruct other people, whether
they be kindergarten pupils, graduate students, our own children, or
employees and colleagues, and it is these qualities, as much as our
knowledge and techniques, that are likely to count in determining our
effectiveness with any students. Yet we rarely think about these
qualities, are never introduced to them as we try to become teachers,
and we are scarcely ever encouraged to discuss them as we pursue our
careers in the classroom.

This occurs in the face of the overwhelming weight of our memories.
We recall the great teachers of our lives principally as
characters--for the stories they told, the distinctive ways they kept
order, their extraordinary hold on our attention, their gravitas, or
their mannerisms and expressions--rather than for what they knew or how
they taught us, which we are likely to have forgotten. These teachers
seemed great as human beings before we knew them as superb scholars or
ingenious instructors. "Who you are," a student once remarked to a
teacher, "speaks so loudly that I cannot hear a word you say." Nor were
the teachers we most disliked necessarily poor scholars or inadequate
in the arts of presentation; they just seemed unappealing to us as
people; there was something about them that did not "fit" with our own
personalities. And thus it always seems to be: Effective, surely great,
teaching is composed of more than just knowledge or method; it is
fashioned out of spirit and personality, out of qualities inherent in
all of us. We forget these human elements of teaching at our peril.
Worse, by ignoring them, we do great injury to our students.

Knowledge of subject and knowledge of technique are taken to be
the only prerequisites to becoming a teacher. Knowledge of self is
considered irrelevant.

Teaching is such a common activity that it is usually taken for
granted--at least until, as today, we decide, whether correctly or not,
that it is being done so badly. Perhaps because all of us, as parents,
colleagues, or supervisors, teach something to someone else now and
then, we assume that there is nothing particularly complicated about
instructing others; it is something that anyone can do. There seems
nothing very difficult or inexplicable about it. Just get up there, we
are inclined to urge the uninitiated, and do it. Yet in fact even to
the most experienced and gifted teachers, teaching's true nature
remains largely mysterious--or at least indefinable. We do not
understand completely what makes for effective teaching. We cannot
figure out why some people are better at it than others. And we do not
know how to ensure the creation of effective teachers out of those who
aspire to become teachers--as if we could turn out teachers as an
assembly line turns out dependable and identical goods anyway.

Yet rather than taking the mystery of teaching as a telltale sign of
teaching's nature, we tend to try to define that mystery out of
existence. Rather than trying to understand what is truly indefinable
about teaching, we concern ourselves exclusively with the concrete
instruments of teaching, like knowledge and skills, that can be
measured by tests or other kinds of evaluations. Those concrete
constituents of teaching are what are taught in schools of education.
As a result, those who carry on the back-breaking work of instruction
as well as those who prepare teachers for it rarely, if ever, concern
themselves with the personal qualities and dispositions, the aspects of
self, that, willy-nilly, all teachers bring to their endeavor. Put more
specifically, consideration of these qualities and
dispositions--consideration of the human qualities of the people who
teach--is the missing dimension of teacher training, in-service
programs, and conversations among teachers themselves. Knowledge of
subject and knowledge of technique are taken to be the only
prerequisites to becoming a teacher. Knowledge of self is considered
irrelevant.

Self-knowledge is the missing dimension of our preparation and
growth as teachers in part because acknowledging its importance would
require acknowledging another fact that is at the root of the mystery
of teaching--that teaching is an art, not a science.

Like any art, of course, we can isolate its components. For
painting, for instance, we can specify ground, medium, color, form, and
tools--those elements that seem to make up a finished canvas. Yet it is
painters' unique selves, not their paintbrushes or the kinds of paint
they use, that animate those components of their craft and make those
components into what has never before been seen--works of art.
Similarly, just as the various components of a work of art do not make
art, neither do intellectual content and instructional method alone
make teaching. Original acts of teaching, like those of art, cannot be
replicated. They are unique.

How can we teach our students to understand and lead life in all
its fullness if we are guilty of neglecting our own human
characteristics?

Yet by contrast with those who study painting, teachers are not led
during their professional preparation to isolate and examine the
analogous, constituent, human elements of teaching. They are not led to
consider that they, as people, are the keys to the success of their
instruction. It is as if painters-in-training were never asked to
become conscious of the chemical qualities of the paints they use, the
spatial perspectives they employ, and the points of view they impose on
their subjects. It is thus left to teaching to be arguably the last
frontier of the unexamined professional self.

The qualities that make for effective teaching are inherent in all
of us. They must be summoned from within ourselves; while they can be
developed, they are not and cannot be imposed. What teachers do cannot
be distinguished from who they are. It is their human qualities that
create their teaching. It is the components of their very selves that
give their knowledge and technique both meaning and effectiveness. And
it is these qualities that form the innumerable daily spontaneous acts
that constitute their instruction.

The qualities of self that are woven into every act of instruction
are perhaps numberless; surely they are many. What they are can no
doubt be debated. Surely, however, the principal ones are learning,
authority, ethics, order, imagination, compassion, patience, character,
and pleasure. To them one might add such others as enthusiasm and
industry (although those are embodied in the others). They all
overlap--imagination, for instance, being a large ingredient of
compassion--and some can exist in an effective teacher without others.
All compose the identity of each teacher, and a book could be written
about each. What we insist on here is that, just like the components of
knowledge and technique, the components of self that make up all
teaching can be--and ought to be--identified, specified, discussed, and
analyzed.

How that might come about is another matter. We think it unlikely
that schools of education will take up the work of doing so or that
in-service programs, those scandals of American schooling, will do so
either. We would rather put our hopes in individual teachers, who might
begin by thinking concretely and honestly about their own personal
qualities and dispositions and then initiate some conversations with
their colleagues about the "who" of teaching. That way, they are likely
to arrive at a deeper understanding of the great and exacting gifts of
self the best of them make to their students every day. After all, how
can we teach our students to understand and lead life in all its
fullness--the guiding aim of education--if we are guilty of neglecting
our own human characteristics as we pursue our calling?

James M. Banner Jr. and Harold C. Cannon have taught schoolchildren,
high school students, collegians, doctoral candidates, military
personnel, and school teachers, among others. They are the authors of
The Elements of Teaching, published this week by Yale University
Press.